Author: Michael W Jackson

Recommended for adults.
Another profound examination of life by this blighted soul, Carson McCullers. It opens with Malone, a small town pharmacist, being told he has leukaemia and a year to live. During the novel he reflects on his life, ponders his own death, while meeting his friends and customers. He also discovers somethings about himself, some good and some not.

The novel becomes a sustained critique of racism, though the word ‘critique’ is not right. ‘Satire’ might be a better word were the subject not so immediate and serious. In these pages two blacks are killed, each murder involves a law officer, but nothing is done to apprehend the perpetrators. Indeed one is killed by a police officer on the street in daylight.
It is not all grim. The Judge’s breakfast is told as an act of loving tenderness. That man loves to eat and is digging his own grave with his teeth, as he says. He has a cracked-brain plan to revive his political career by proposing that the hated Federal Government (Dwight Eisenhower was president at the time) convert Confederate dollars into coin of the realm. His grandson Jester, whom the widowed Judge loves beyond word, rejects this along with the Judge’s ingrained white supremacist attitude and by chance seeks out the company of a black man who is unreliable and suspicious, and yet there is some rapport between them that each recognizes and neither understands.
The Judge’s wife died years ago, and his son committed suicide quite a time ago, too, and that hangs over the Judge and all who mix with him.
Malone goes through the five stages of grief for himself, denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. But Malone does not figure in the middle of the story.
There the principals are Judge Fox Clane, his dead son John Clane whom we meet in retrospect, his grandson Jester, and the black Sherman Pew. John Clane, though married came to love another woman who in turn had a sexual liaison with a black man which produced Sherman. John Clane defended this black lover when accused of the murder of the estranged husband of this other woman, and John Clane lost and so did his client. Then the woman rejected him and so he took his own life, twice over a failure. This is revealed piece-by-piece in the middle of the novel. The Judge knows all and indeed he presided at the trial where his son defended the hopeless cause. That may seem strange to law students, but reality is a lot more confused than textbooks.
Judge Fox Clane is portrayed as a nearly perfect fool. When Jester, Sherman, or others ridicule him, he genuinely thinks it is praise, etc. He even confides his plan to cash in Confederate dollars and almost proposes a return to slavery to the black Sherman Pew and then is puzzled when he – Sherman – gets mad. The Judge is not clever like a fox, despite his name. This staunch defender of white supremacy is incoherent and babbling most of the time with zero self-knowledge. Perhaps his most pitiful hour is when he goes on radio to denounce the Supreme Court ruling in Brown vs the Board of Education of Topeka Kansas and can only recite Lincoln’s Gettysburg address because it the only thing he can call to mind, apart from swearing, such are his limited power of thought and concentration. So he quotes Lincoln to the consternation of the radio station personnel.
There are many earlier pitiful moments for the Judge but he usually does not himself notice. That is the satire, I guess, of the bigoted southern official, pompous, stupid, and incompetent, but nonetheless a leader. (Brown was in 1954. I have been to that school which is now a museum.)
When Sherman finds out his origins, he rebels and in the end is murdered by a white racist thug encouraged by the Judge in his foggy way. Malone first drew the lot to murder Sherman but he refused and so discovered something in himself. His story bookends the novel. It starts with his diagnosis and ends with his death. Sherman has been portrayed throughout as lost between two worlds, neither black nor white, and though neither of them knew the background, Sherman and Jester become friends in a bickering kind of way. Malone is also between two worlds: the living and the dead.
Part of Malone’s reaction to his diagnosis is to take better care of himself in diet, getting dental work, and so on.
The end came to Malone: ‘A strange lightness came upon his soul and he exalted. He looked at nature now and it was part of himself. He was no longer a man watching a clock without hands.’ It would seem that the Judge did not last much longer at age 85. That would leave Jester as the next generation to right all these wrongs.

Escapist reading par excellence. Recommended for fast-paced fun. If a diversion is needed from the daily rut, try this novel.

This is the fifth Ethan Gage novel I have read and I have enjoyed them a lot. What’s to like about them? First and foremost is the pace. They go a mile a minute. By page 50 Ethan has been involved in, always innocently, inadvertently, or mistakenly he would say, the burning down of a palace, a gigantic theft, a tumultuous revolution, a botched assassination attempt, and been bedded by the sister of a very powerful and angry brother who commands a battalion of villainous cutthroats. After the first 50 pages the action picks up speed! Whew.

The fluid loyalties during the Napoleonic wars and peaces provide the context. As an American Ethan is sometimes welcomed by either agents of France or Britain or both, but only briefly as alliances, wars, peaces come and go. Ethan was there when the Rosetta Stone came to light in Egypt. He found the tree at the centre of the world in the Louisiana Purchase, he triggered a slave rebellion in the Caribbean, he was captured by Barbary pirates…..what a curriculum vitae he has.

Then there is Ethan’s self-deprecating humour. Though he knows himself to be a bumbler extraordinaire his reputation as the James Bond of his time just grows and grows. He knows himself to be a peaceful scientist, though he has been instrumental in the outcome at the Siege of Acre and the Battle of the Trafalgar while trying to get home in time for dinner. He knows himself to be a faithful husband….Can he help it if all the women he encounters are beautiful and throw themselves at him? His wife certainly thinks so and she has had to come and get him out of trouble more than once, cutlass in hand.

The novels are peopled by historical figures like Napoleon, Pitt the Younger, Toussaint Louverture, Horatio Nelson and others. These luminaries, constantly plotting against each other, see in Ethan a catspaw. They lie to him, manipulate him, tempt him and he has little resistance to any of it. Hope ever trumps experience, and Ethan thinks he can outsmart these puppet masters and he is always wrong. Fortunately he never learns and comes back for more in the next novel!

I went through a Napoleon phrase once. Why? I was fascinated by fragmentary accounts I had come across of his ability to multi-task anywhere, to micro-manage from afar, to shift gears in an instant from one problem to another, to size up a man and extract what he needed from him, coupled with the inability to see reality (think Russia or the catastrophic naval exercise at Boulogne), all of these made me wonder how he did it. I was also fascinated to see the practical improvements at Versailles to make work more efficient, e.g., a table in the bath, seats for secretaries to take notes while he performed ‘the essential tasks,’ as Aristotle called them. (Figure it out.) I read three biographies, all of them weighty tomes. I cannot list the titles because I did not find answers in any of them so there were no notes. Here he is again in these books, dominating much of the world.

NB there is a reference to Machiavelli on p124 ‘Napoleon was building a clan worthy of Machiavelli.’ (Huh?)

I do hope Ethan Gage does not yet retire, as he often dreams of doing, because he has not yet visited his particular brand of mayhem on India. There another whole continent awaits him! I thought this one to be a return to top form, as I found the last one in the Caribbean a little forced. This one meets the rollick standard.

After the steeped sorrow of Carson McCullers, Ethan Gage is a welcome change of pace.

The long fallout from youthful idealism and the intoxication of creating a brave new world, Prospero, in the United Nations. Recommended for anyone who remembers 11 November 1975.
‘Long fallout’ is a geologist’s term for the run of material in a seismic shift miles from the fault where the fracture occurred. If I remember it rightly from Wallace Stegner’s novel Angle of Repose (1971). Freya, Simon, and Roy are the protagonists, centring on Roy through whose eyes we see most of it. By the end Roy’s sister Alison, it turns out, was also a more of a player than Roy realized. Oops, that is a spoiler, I guess.

They were motivated by causes in the 1930s and carried those goals into government service during World War II. They had met many True Believers, including Roy’s sister, fellow travellers, dilettantes, voyeurs, and Stalinists. At Oxford they individually had brushed against Left Champions like the Red Peer (who is Erridge in The Dance to the Music of Time). At times they do favours for each other or for friends of friends involving confidential information. At the San Francisco conference founding the United Nations Roy met Alger Hiss. Because of this meeting he is forever slightly suspect. Yet Roy is in but not of this coterie, always a little aloof and withdrawn.
Of course the title refers to the dismissal of the Whitlam government on 11 November 1975 and the lead up to that event provides the context for the reckoning among the three. Will their respective pasts catchup to one or all three of them? What is it that is in the past of each anyway? Should they stick together or seal themselves off from one another?
They had earlier weathered the Petrov Royal Commission with Roy singled out for doubt, though nothing more. He lived it down at the Sydney Bar in the following years. He became a legal consultant to the Whitlam government and like everyone else is caught in the tsunami of the Loans Affair (which seemed then and seems now like something from a Marx Brother movie). If Roy’s past is remembered will it sink the already sinking government? The captain and crew are the only ones who do not realise the boat is already sunk, as they row furiously on. Not sinking, sunk.
The telling is paced and methodical. The pieces slowly come together. The treatment of the many characters from Gough Whitlam, Malcolm Fraser, Garfield Barwick, John Kerr, to Doc Evatt is even-handed. Some pseudonyms are used and it is fun speculating on who these creations represent. I thought Dusty was a slice of Alan Ramsay, not the whole man at the time but an aspect of his earlier self.
There are nice details like the furnishings of Yarralumla, and its origins, a state visit by Vice-President Spiro Agnew, the fishbowl of official Canberra. The formality of Canberra at the time seems a long time ago, seating by status even on a minibus to the airport, an entourage of eight for the Governor-General to go to Sydney for a private visit, etc. all that seems almost foreign, something from another country, not simply another time.
The novel closes with the frenetic effort to find a parliamentary and constitutional means to save the Whitlam government, as if a form of words, or application of an arcane parliamentary maneuver would have stayed the doom. A delay might have held off the doom a few more days but nothing more, but the stalwarts clutch at the straw that public opinion will change.
In 1950s Canberra Roy and company would have come across Edith Berry from Grand Hotel, Dark Palace, and Cold Light. She is a more fully developed character than anyone in these pages. The prose is…workman like. More like a brief that uses some fictional devices to lay out the material than a novel where we enter another world as seen by someone else.
Speaking of connections, Roy’s wife, Judith, is the daughter of the architect of the amphitheatre at Castlecrag. Roy and Judith met at amateur theatrics there. Judith is merely a plot device, apart from that intriguing reference.
This counts as another Perth book because the author lives in Perth, but nothing in the book relates in any way to West Australia except some mentions once or twice of offshore islands considered for nuclear tests.
I have read several of his other novels, Quarantine, The Blue Guitar, Bellarmine Jug, Truant State, The Country without Music, and The Blosseville File. I was once on an APSA panel with Nicholas Hasluck and had lunch with him a few months later on Perth with his father who figures briefly in this book.
Read it in Darwin, August 2013.

Only recommended for travellers who haunt museums and galleries. I read it because I liked Eucalyptus so much.
Inventive for the sake of being inventive. A show-off adolescent kind of clever. More a series of (forced) vignettes than a novel. There is no red line tying all the incidents together. Incoherent, in short, with more than one non sequitur.

Travel and traveling companions. What did Sartre say about other people? He must have met Garry Atlas of this book, loud, leering, and humourless joke-teller. Travel is enough work on its own but in this package tour the thirteen Aussies are always on duty. Noisy, sneering, crude, insensitive, imperceptive, well some of them. Nothing is as good as home, they bellow. They had to leave home to discover that, it seems, especially the beer.
The blind man is the mad photographer though his pictures seldom include the subject. The author is trying too hard to be offbeat.
Yet there is much to like: holographic equations from the science museum and the corrugated iron collection exhibiting its many uses. Then there is the leg museum in Ecuador. The marriage institute in the United States. I left out the Pygmy Collection in Africa. Yes, ‘Collection’ and that confused the travellers, too. ‘Have you ever met an interesting Canadian?’ That is a stumper on page 298. The Ayers Rock nose show, the aside on aerogrammes, the exhibition of extremities, the superfluous chapter on Russia, the centre of gravity, it just got to be show-off stuff, not a story, not a plot, not character development, not a study of relationships. Though I did like the demonstration at Lenin’s tomb, I admit, Comrade.
The reference to airport architecture as Esperanto was good. The same everywhere and soulless. The flag falling onto one of the travellers was cute. Voss is mentioned as if a real explorer along with Leichhardt, Flinders, Cook, etc. I read that one years ago and swore off the sanctimonious Patrick White forever, filing him with Samuel Marsden.
Not as whimsical and enchanting as Eucalyptus but the same motif, a cast of characters with short stories inserted in it making it a novel comprised of short stories or vignettes.
Inventive, yes, but no plot, no story, no character development, no relationship among them. And no sense of place in any of the places. Still a prize winning novel that made his name. Go figure.
The introduction by Peter Conrad is just a summary.
Read it in Darwin, August 2013.

Cloudstreet (1991) by Tim Winton.
Exhilarating, depressing, amusing, frightening, confusing, boring, exciting, just like life. Recommended for adults. If you liked Iron Man III, do not read this novel.
The novel is a ramshackle chronicle of two families, the Pickleses and the Lambs. By twists and turns they come to share a house owned by the luckless and penniless Sam Pickles. Over more than twenty years at 1 Cloud Street the two clans together become a tribe through many trials and tribulations. Sam supports the bookies and his sodden wife Dolly likes men with pants. Their daughter, Rose, the oldest of three children, hates her mother a little more than her father (a deliberate ambiguity). Brothers Ted and Chub are, be it said, no more than ciphers. Oriel Lamb has the drive of a sergeant-major and her husband Lester was trained by the army in two wars to obey. Their children are Quick, Fish, Lon, Hat, Elaine, and Red. The first three are boys and the last girls, these being family nicknames.

From 1945 to 1965 they bounce off each other, spin out of control, try out the temptations of Perth, hate and love one another, punctuated by long periods of mutual indifference.
The Monster of Nedlands appears to remind us all how vulnerable the gravity is that holds us to this life. He also figures in Robert Drewe’s Shark Net (2000). There is a pig who seems a relative of the one in In the Winter Dark by Winton.
The Lambs are noisy Baptists and the Pickleses are … Nothing much. But Sam Pickles needs the rent and Lester Lamb needs the roof so they accommodate each other. Over the years an elastic modus vivendi keeps them in orbit around each other.
Sam waits for his luck to change while doing as little as possible, apart from blaming everyone else for making him a victim. Oriel does too much, too often, and makes her own luck with the loyal Lester at her side, when he is not in the kitchen turning our pastries and pies for the shop. That is the overarching theme, these two attitudes to life: the fatalism of luck or the energy of work.
The story line is the gradual convergence of Rose and Quick. Oops, that is a spoiler. He is called Quick in the way a giant is called Tiny. Rose reads books, including novels like Jane Eyre. Moreover, she is diabolically smart though needs must and she leaves school at the legal age of 16.
I did not know what to make of Quick’s wall of misery, newspaper cuttings of loss and destruction he cut out and stuck on the wall in his room when he was 14 or so. Still less did I know what to make of Quick’s guardian angel, the aboriginal, who several times advises him, and appears at least once to another. More importantly, I did not know what to make of the house-mysticism in the book. It is often implied that the house itself has character or an aura but it is not manifested in the prose.
Some things are elided to concentrate on the story, like the paper work associated with running a small business.
I have read a couple of Winton’s books before and liked them, e.g., In the Winter Dark and The Riders.
One of the blurb writers on the back cover says it is a working class novel. Well that is Sam Pickles but not the shop keeping Lambs, surely. As usual the bourgeoisie does not understand what working class means, never having done it themselves. It does not mean owning and running a shop (Lamb), or living off the rental of property (Pickles).
I read this in anticipation of going to a conference in Perth in September. I have several more Perth titles in readiness.
Read it in Darwin, August 2013.